Explaining My Signature Line

[Mike Taylor]

That is is the last line of George W Bush's inaugural speech from his first term as President. Reading the speech now, which I have stored on my hard drive, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yes, I voted for the man twice, but that was less in support of him and more due to the fact that I liked the other side even less. Boy, did his administration make a mess out of things. That's saying a lot for a guy who voted Republican in the last four elections.

End of rant....

[Evandril]

him backing a bill to get Pagans out of the military before he made Prez was enough to insure *I* would never vote for him. He also backed the xtian missle officer who refused to work in a silo with just him and a female, for religious reasons. (Loved that one m'self...Guess his view was that 'thou shalt not kill' was optional, but taking a chance of being led into temptation...that's just wrong!)

Oh, fyi...In *my* terms... Christian - Someone who actually has a clue about their own religion, and tries to live by it's rules. xtian - idiot bible thumpers without a clue

[Leffy]

So this begs the question from me... who do you think are our better candidates this go round? personally i think hillary did ok in her first run, why not make it an official attempt again? downside is since her husband fucked up shes gone more gung ho on the zealous stuff. admittedly i just want to see a chick up there. then again theyd have to hide the red phone fairly often... atleast once a month if shes still in working order and if not then atleast until she gets her daily hormones......

[Mike Taylor]

Right now, I'm not real keen on any of the candidates.

[toreador]

i know im in the uk and not the usa, but i think that a pack of constipated monkeys would run things better in both our countrys right now everythings just fallen to peaces over the last 2 or 3 years!

[Wayne]

Right now, I'm not real keen on any of the candidates.

This would be a better place if the entire U.S. thought this way until August of 2008.

[Seolta]

him backing a bill to get Pagans out of the military before he made Prez was enough to insure *I* would never vote for him.

Ditto...the first time he ran, I voted for the most likely person to keep him out of office. Second time through, I voted for who I thought would do the best job based on what I felt needed doing, and screw this whole "there are only two 'real' parties" business.

[garfalk]

i hate bush. hes a monkey.
i hate being the same species.

as to '08, im thinking of going obama. he's pretty.
also, male.
(am i digging this hole deep? yea)

[Plunder Down-Under]

I have no problem voting with a third party if the main parties suck

[Mike Taylor]

You have more than three parties down there, anyway. Voting third party here just guarantees that one of the other two big ones will win by taking votes from the other. Only a truly viable third-party candidate will get my attention, and only if we share a majority of the same views.

[Plunder Down-Under]

And there never will be a third party if no-one even considers them

[Seolta]

And there never will be a third party if no-one even considers them

Exactly. Moreover, voting for someone other than the big two sends a message that you don't approve of either of 'em, and do approve of whatever it is the party/candidate you did vote for represents...which in turn could influence their decisions and actions, in order to get you to vote for them instead, next time around.

[Mike Taylor]

And there never will be a third party if no-one even considers them

The problem here is that, in our recent history, third parties have consisted of fringe groups that most people would not support (Greens, LaRouche, etc). In order to be viable, they're going to have to grab and hold the average person's attention and have a platform that the average person understands and can relate to. Moreover, such a party would have to have moderate/centrist views and not allow itself to be affiliated with people like Anne Coulter (on the right) and Michael Moore (on the left).

[kitty!]

{sic}..not allow itself to be affiliated with people like Anne Coulter (on the right) and Michael Moore (on the left).

Anne Coulter fills me with a fiery rage of a thousand suns, and Micheal Moore sets off me skeez-dar a little too much. I wouldn't want to be left alone in a room with him even if I was heavily armed and all he has was the clothes on his back.

I mean, Crazeyal doesn't set off the skeez-dar as much as Micheal Moore does. Not even by a fraction of an iota!

[Wayne]

What's real bad is that I am from the same place as Moore (Flint, MI) and most people think we are the same as him, when in fact the majority of us hate him.

A friend of mine works in a medical dept with his aunt and she said that most of his own family doesn't like him.

[Mike Taylor]

Most of the Michiganders I've met don't have many nice things to say about him.

[Plunder Down-Under]

I like his doco's, even if he does occasionally cross the line without regret get to a second line feel a little guilty but crossing, but continue on until he reaches a third line before stopping.

(anyone recognise where the line analogy is nicked from?)

[Wayne]

Most of the Michiganders I've met don't have many nice things to say about him.

After all the bad press and horrible way he made us look in Roger & Me I can't even stomache the idea of watching anything of his. I do know that with that first one he might have ment well but it just didn't turn out well.

[Mike Taylor]

I like his doco's, even if he does occasionally cross the line without regret get to a second line feel a little guilty but crossing, but continue on until he reaches a third line before stopping.

(anyone recognise where the line analogy is nicked from?)

Just remember to take his "documentaries" with a grain of salt. A documentary is supposed to be factual. Moore's movies take a few liberties with facts. Just ask Wayne here. *points up*

[Crazeyal]

.

I mean, Crazeyal doesn't set off the skeez-dar Sweetie...

Not with PLUNDER'S DICK!!!:dp:


Although...

:dgrin::whip:
might just be in yer future if you ever make it to DC...

:dgrin:

[greyloch]

Bad AL!!! Bad! No orgy for you! :plasma:

She's still jailbait and don't think she's into that shit.

Skeez-dar? Oy vey ... :rolleyes:

Do we have to get all political? I deal with this stuff everyday in my professional life and it's not that fun. :whipass:

"People who like sausage and politics should never watch either one being made." :dgrin:

[Mike Taylor]

It's all good. The only reason I posted it was to answer any questions that might have come my way. I'll probably change the quote in a week or so anyways.

[Leffy]

this is one of the few political conversations i have ever witnessed that did not end in an angry fight. its refreshing.

then again the other one didn't have a chance to end in an angry fight because the one that was most zealous in his ideas was a tad too drunk and attempted to end the conversation by going to the others car with intent to vandalize it. he stepped in a mole hole, fell over, and promptly fell asleep 3 feet shy of his intended goal.

[Crazeyal]

Bad AL!!! Bad!
Just noticing now???:al:

[Mike Taylor]

this is one of the few political conversations i have ever witnessed that did not end in an angry fight. its refreshing.

then again the other one didn't have a chance to end in an angry fight because the one that was most zealous in his ideas was a tad too drunk and attempted to end the conversation by going to the others car with intent to vandalize it. he stepped in a mole hole, fell over, and promptly fell asleep 3 feet shy of his intended goal.

I'm not a very political person by nature, so if I speak up, it's means something has gone wrong.

And what are we all doing hanging out over here anyhow, there's a PARTY thread what needs some attention! Last one to the rum doesn't get any!

*takes off*

[KiaKat]

Can we kill that newbie, instead of pouncing?

[Evandril]

That little upside-down yeild sign in the upper right is a nice 'report post' button...the suicidal bot will be terminated soon :D

[KiaKat]

Eh, I know. I'm just in a homicidal mood, for some odd reason. Might have something to do with a co-worker I'm considering discussing on Customers Suck.

[Plunder Down-Under]

It's not a newbie, its a bot.

[Evandril]

Oh? Details! :D Might as well post it here, we'd have fun reactions to it as well *hugs*

[sableagle]

Anne Coulter fills me with a fiery rage of a thousand suns, and Micheal Moore sets off me skeez-dar a little too much. I wouldn't want to be left alone in a room with him even if I was heavily armed and all he has was the clothes on his back........... Would you prefer that scenario modified to remove his clothes?!?

McCain's too much like Bush and still thinks "we" could win something in Iraq. Other than Halliburton winning another hundred billion US taxpayers' dollars, what?

Clinton and Obama are both way too religious for me. Other than that little detail, I like Obama so far. I actually heard someone say that he hopes "that Obama does get assassinated if gets elected because {he doesn't} want a fundamentalist Muslim as president." Er ... no ...

Joan Smith: Give thanks and praise for John McCain (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-give-thanks-and-praise-for-john-mccain-809558.html)

Last weekend, as Clinton and Obama shamelessly vied for evangelical votes at a Christian forum in Pennsylvania, McCain was absent, underlining the fact that he doesn't do God – not in public, at any rate. In a campaign notable for the nauseating religiosity of the other candidates, McCain had the guts to turn down an invitation to speak at the forum, saying that his religious faith was intense but private.

Incredible as it seems, with a hugely unpopular evangelical President in the White House, this time it's the Democrats who have got God, and they go on about it at a length which would have British audiences screaming for the sick bag.

Sadly, there is no evidence for the theory put forward by worried Democrats that either candidate's religious fervour is tactical. When Clinton published her autobiography, Living History, five years ago, she included a picture of herself with her "prayer group" enjoying a "cookout" in 1993. That was the year, according to the radical magazine Mother Jones, in which Clinton became "an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship", a network of political, business and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ.

Warlike metaphors pop up in her rhetoric, such as the occasion last summer when she attended a forum hosted by an evangelical Christian group called the Sojourners and was asked how her faith had helped her get through the scandal caused by her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Without missing a beat, Clinton was off, thanking "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me".

Democrats who dislike this stuff as much as I do can't take much comfort from Obama, who asked a church audience in Bible-Belt South Carolina to help him become an "instrument of God" and join him in creating "a Kingdom right here on earth". In recent weeks, Obama has tried to distance himself from a controversial black pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright Jr, whose divisive views about race have been given a wide airing; the candidate is visibly irritated these days by suggestions that Wright was his mentor.

But the fact remains that the pastor officiated at Obama's wedding and it was in his Trinity United Church of Christ on the Southside of Chicago that Obama, once a sceptic like his parents, committed himself to God in the 1980s: "Kneeling beneath that cross on the Southside, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth".

I'm not quite rooting for McCain, but I've had more than enough of Clinton and Obama banging on about their imaginary friends.

I include the bit about "prayer warriors" and "warlike metaphors" because it leads into this:

Tough-talking Clinton vows to 'obliterate' Iran if it ever dares to attack US ally Israel (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/toughtalking-clinton-vows-to-obliterate-iran-if-it-ever-dares-to-attack-us-ally-israel-814090.html)

Hillary Clinton sought to burnish her reputation as a hawk by warning Iran that as president she was prepared to "obliterate" the country, should it launch a nuclear attack against Israel.

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran [if it attacks Israel]," Mrs Clinton said in an interview with the ABC network.

Mr Obama rejected her remarks as sabre-rattling. "One of the things that we've seen over the past several years is a bunch of talk using words like 'obliterate'," the Illinois senator said. "It doesn't actually produce good results."

Mrs Clinton's remarks were an escalation of an earlier statement that she would offer a nuclear shield to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Israel to protect them from Iran.

"I don't think the margin matters," Mrs Clinton told NBC, while refusing to directly answer a question about what she would do if Pennsylvania did not hand her a crushing victory over her opponent. Her communications director, Howard Wolfson, told reporters: "I object to the notion that we need to achieve a certain standard of victory other than victory."

Scared enough yet?

Clinton Threatens to ‘Obliterate’ Iran (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080422_robert_scheer_apr_23_clinton_and_iran/)

Shouldn’t the potential leader of a nation that used nuclear bombs to obliterate hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese employ extreme caution before making such a threat? Neither the Japanese then nor the Iranian people now were in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and to approve such collective punishment of innocents is to endorse terrorism. This from a candidate who attacked her opponent for suggesting targeted strikes against militants in Pakistan and derided his openness to negotiations with other national leaders as an irresponsible commitment on the part of a contender for the presidency.

Clearly the heat of a campaign is not the proper setting for consideration of a response to a threat from a nation that is a long way from developing nuclear weapons. Obviously the danger of Iran’s developing such weapons can be met with a range of alternatives, from the diplomatic to the military, that do not involve genocide and at any rate must be considered in moral and not solely political terms. Or is it base political ambition that would guide Clinton if she received that middle-of-the-night phone call?

If so, it cannot be assumed that Hillary Clinton as president would be less irrationally hawkish and more restrained in the unleashing of military force than John McCain. The latter, at least, has personal experience with the true, on-the-ground costs of militarism gone wild. Yes, I know that McCain still holds out the hope of winning the Iraq war that both he and Hillary originally endorsed, but for Clinton to raise the rhetoric against Iran in the midst of a campaign is hardly the path to Mideast peace, whether it concerns Israel or Iraq. It is bizarre that a politician who bought into the phony threat about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD arsenal now plays political games with the alleged threat posed by Iran.

That's a double-standard as recorded on the disk with -1 and +1, not the usual 1 and 0 of a conventional double standard, eh?

That's the problem with a democracy. The only people ever elected are the ones who want to rule the world enough to put their names on the ballot.

Capitalist representative democracy brings the marvellous change that the people with the power represent the people with the money. Capitalism, in its purest form, means everything is for sale, votes, voters, politicians, policies, laws, judges, court cases, children, river valleys, the ocean, the lot. Obviously, the sort of people successful at getting rich are likely to invest carefully in making sure they get even richer and thus more powerful, so they turn it into a plutocracy, and then most of them want to be able to personally choose a successor who inherits all that money and power, so you're right back to aristocracy and wasn't that what you were supposed to be getting rid of back in early July 1776 or whenever it was?

Of course if you go for communism you need a totalitarian regime to enforce it ... and that becomes effectively one corporation owning all the land, all the buildings and everything and not only paying employees but also allocating their jobs, homes, cars, creche facilities and children's schools and issuing security passes aka passports, with the Communist Party as the Board of Directors, the Chairman of the Party as the Chairman of the Board and the President as the CEO. Off the opposite side of that spectrum and right back to the system that rose out of anarchy before anyone ever declared such a thing as human rights.

All in all, it's a hundred blind people in a big circle with long straw blowing at a small ball on top of a larger ball.

I vote meteorite. Meteorite in the White House 2008! You know you want to see it!

[Rapscallion]

Can we kill that newbie, instead of pouncing?

Banned 'em, deleted post, banned IP addie...

Cheers for the heads-up, folks!

Rapscallion

[Evandril]

Banned 'em, deleted post, banned IP addie...

Cheers for the heads-up, folks!

Rapscallion

Yay! Nicely done, Raps, as always!

Feel better, Kia? One each deaded bot! :D

[KiaKat]

Yay! Happy-bot-killing-spree time!

[Sehson]

was there a second one????

I got one bright and early this morning....

[KiaKat]

Yup. A v14gr4bot.

Bleah. I'm tired of cleaning out bots. Spam killed my blog, and it has yet to get back up, because the spam is so widespread. I've been working on it for months now, closing comments/trackbacks and upgrading and deleting and deleting and deleting and no, wait, that's not a spam comment, and deleting, and OH MY GOD WILL IT NEVER STOP!

Rocks fall and everyone dies. HEAR ME?! ROCKS FALL AND EVERYONE DIES! Time for the slash and burn. I'm deleting the comments/trackbacks tables, and I'll just have to deal with the good being taken away along with the bad.

[Mike Taylor]

Thread Necromancy a la Spambot. Gotta love it. :facepalm:

[Rapscallion]

Thread closed by request of OP.

Tainted by spammer, methinks.

Rapscallion